Under a new program that beings September 3, the City of New York will push hospitals to keep baby formula locked up and away from new parents in an attempt to pressure moms to breastfeed their infants. The new most-restrictive program in the nation, the supposedly voluntary Latch On NYC initiative, has pressured 27 of the 40 NYC hospitals to give up the swag they are given from formula-making companies and making them document medical reasons for newborns not breastfeeding.

As Fox News reports, not everyone is happy with the decision from the office of Mayor Bloomberg, who has been one of the most ardent abortion supporters in the country and signed into law a city council-approved bill targeting pregnancy centers offering abortion alternatives.

While breast-feeding activists applaud the move, bottle-feeding moms are bristling at the latest lactation lecture.

“If they put pressure on me, I would get annoyed,” said Lynn Sidnam, a Staten Island mother of two formula-fed girls, ages 4 months and 9 years. “It’s for me to choose.”

Under Latch On NYC, new mothers who want formula won’t be denied it, but hospitals will keep infant formula in out-of-the-way secure storerooms or in locked boxes like those used to dispense and track medications. With each bottle a mother requests and receives, she’ll also get a talking-to. Staffers will explain why she should offer the breast instead.

The news is ironic to pro-life blogger, scientist and New York City resident Gerard Nadal, who says it is more confirmation that the entire “my body, my choice” mantra from the pro-abortion side is nothing more than fiction.

Whatever happened to “Choice?” Specifically, “My body, my choice!”

Bloomberg’s actions could easily be written off as the obsessive eccentricities of a daffy billionaire who is squandering political capital on needless battles over personal liberties issues while his city plunges further into educational, financial, and criminal disarray, especially in a summer that has seen the murder rate soar. But this would be a mistaken assessment.

The truth is that Bloomberg’s actions comport with the broader agenda of his political party as the nation hurtles toward nationalized health care, complete with rationing systems set in place.

A few months back I had dinner with my friend, Reggie Littlejohn who began and runs the great organization, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, dedicated to ending the one child policy, forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China. At dinner, I asked Reggie to help me understand how and why it could be in the best interest of the government of China to maintain and enforce such policies, especially in light of their desire to be an economic superpower. Reggie’s answer was a cause for great concern in light of Granny B. and company.

“If the government can control your body, your fertility, they can control every aspect of your life. It’s a tool of totalitarian control.”

I couldn’t help but remember those words as I read of Bloomberg’s newest mechanism of control. Voluntary on the part of hospitals, for now, but coercive for patients. These same democrats who would apply coercive pressure on mothers to have their babies continue to feed from their bodies post-partum are the same democrats who support killing the child for doing the same while in utero, if that’s the mother’s desire.

So the lesson here is that the only bodily autonomy that is absolutely sacrosanct is an act of autonomy that kills the baby. And my fellow New Yorkers sit still as the legal precedents stripping us of our bodily autonomy continue to mount.

If there is any ray of light in all of this, it’s that the Democrats have finally given up on the mantra, “My body, my choice!”